Friday, 31 December 2010

Most people don’t remember Obamacare’s notorious Section 1233, mandating government payments for end-of-life counseling. It aroused so much anxiety as a possible first slippery step on the road to state-mandated late-life rationing that the Senate never included it in the final health-care law.

Well, it’s back - by administrative fiat. A month ago, Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual “wellness” visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports the New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists ... e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. ... The longer this [regulation] goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for the Democrats’ transparency - and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health-care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.

Thursday, 30 December 2010

At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses. The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college. With some exceptions, they were mainly from families that couldn't afford ever-rising college tabs.

Keep in mind that ROTC students are taking these courses as electives or getting no credit for them at all from their academic institutions. Students at Notre Dame still have to meet Notre Dame’s core curriculum standards. Also, a little searching revealed McCarthy is a graduate of Spring Hill College, whose freshmen today average 1100 on their SATs or 24 on their ACTs. And those little nobodies from plebeian families getting ROTC scholarships?

The most competitive candidates for an Army ROTC Four-Year Scholarship will have at least a SAT score of 1100 or an ACT score of 24.

Wednesday, 29 December 2010

If you’re worried about incomes at the bottom, though, one solution leaps out at you. It’s a solution that worked, at least in the late 1990s under Bill Clinton, when wages at the low end of the income ladder rose fairly dramatically. The solution is tight labor markets. Get employers bidding for scarce workers and you’ll see incomes rise across the board without the need for government aid programs or tax redistribution. A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It’s hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it’s not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it’s not good for income equality.

Odd, then that Obama, in his “war on inequality,” hasn’t made a big effort to prevent illegal immigration--or at least to prevent illegal immigrration from returning with renewed force should the economy recover. He hasn’t, for example, pushed to make it mandatory for employers to use the “E-Verify” system, or some other system, to check the legality of new hires, preferring to hold that reform hostage (sorry!) in order to try and achieve a larger “comprehensive” bill that included a conditional amnesty for the 11 or so million illegals already here. (In Washington, if something’s obviously desirable that means it’s a bargaining chip.) True, Obama has tried to make a big deal of his administration’s deportation numbers, but only as a nose-holding effort to placate the right sufficiently to get a mass legalization bill through. And the deportation numbers themselves are suspect.

Movement at the state level to boost the minimum wage next year could give President Obama some much-needed juice in his stalled push to raise the federal minimum and peg it once and for all to inflation.

Outgoing Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter implied the Chinese cost her re-election in November and secretly funneled money to help her Republican opponent Frank Guinta during a post-election interview with ABC News.

“They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere,” Shea-Porter said in the interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “[A]nd it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.”

There is no evidence that the Chinese funneled money into the First Congressional District race. Such a contribution would be illegal.

Carol Shea-Porter herself, not some shadowy Chinese cabal, was the root cause of her district’s change of electoral heart. (Via InstaPundit.)

There’s a long Power Line discussion about Obambi’s comments on Michael Vick, second chances, and redemption. Both bloggers overlook the obvious. Obambi’s message is really about what it’s always about: himself. Has anyone screwed up more in the last two years? Wouldn’t only a radically forgiving nation re-elect him in 2012?

Is a legislator calling or writing to a member of the Executive Branch with requests for funding an example of earmarking? Not really. The power to grant or deny the request remains with the recipient of the communication, and he is accountable for it.

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

I’ll say this for Obambi’s unemployment estimates: They weren’t off by 97%. You can’t say that about some parts of Obambicare:

The failure of ObamaCare’s Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan has been known for weeks, at least to readers of the Wall Street Journal and Hot Air. The Washington Post catches up to the WSJ a mere 45 days later with this report from Amy Goldstein on the failure of PECIP to attract the 375,000 people the White House and Congress claimed needed the help of subsidies to get health-care coverage. Even with the program falling 97% short of its stated goal, it’s still going to cost more than Congress allocated anyway.

[...]

The announced expectations was [sic] that it would attract 375,000 people by the end of the year. It has only 8,000 enrollees, which means it missed its mark by 97.9%.